The growing awareness of environmental issues in the last fifty years has led to a greater need for more environmentally friendly systems and devices. This growing awareness has also led to a need for better monitoring of potentially environmentally harmful atmospheric emissions from industrial facilities.
Currently, harmful atmospheric emissions can be monitored using, among others, continuous emissions monitoring systems installed at industrial facilities. As well, several large scientific satellite systems have been developed to measure atmospheric trace gases; these satellite systems include Europe's Envisat, the United States' Orbiting Carbon Observatory, and Japan's Greenhouse Gas Observing Satellite.
One drawback of current satellite solutions is that they trade-off swath size for spatial resolution. In order to obtain measurements for the whole planet, current satellites measure several hundred, or even thousands of kilometers, of swath for each orbital path. The highest spatial resolution is therefore currently in the order of single digit kilometers. This makes it difficult to identify atmospheric emissions from individual industrial facilities.
Another drawback with current satellite solutions is that they cannot collect sufficient light at desired wavelengths in each pass to enable measurement of atmospheric trace gases from individual industrial facilities. Several factors, such as the speed at which satellites pass over specific areas, the number of images taken of the specific areas in each pass, and the throughput of their optical systems, contribute to this drawback.
There is therefore a need for systems, methods, and devices which mitigate if not overcome the shortcomings of the prior art for measuring environmentally harmful atmospheric emissions from industrial facilities.